ABOUT NEILSON ACTIVE HOLIDAYS 

Neilson Active Holidays are a specialist travel company providing a range of active holidays for adults and families. Originally part of the Thomas Cook Group, they became independent in 2012.

 

THEIR SITUATION

The breakaway from Thomas Cook in 2012 resulted in the need to move away from Thomas Cook’s payroll outsourcing provision and for Neilson to find their own payroll provider.

Their choice in Trace Payroll reflected their desire to work with an SME-sized business that could provide high levels of customer service. Neilson has a complex payroll with overseas employees, posted workers with PIE (Personal Incidental Expenses) and seasonal working patterns.

When a Private Equity House purchased Trace, it decided to rationalise the payroll businesses it owned and move Trace customers to another platform and processing team.

As Iain Stevenson-Wood, People Director at Neilson Active Holidays, explained, "We were with Trace for years, and it was fantastic. However, once we moved we started to see a decline in how we were managed; it wasn't so personal."

The problems escalated once the payroll was moved to the ‘Business as Usual’ team.

Katie Rawlings, People Executive, went on to describe, "There were problems with them meeting the deadlines that they themselves had put in place. There was no communication if there were delays, which was frustrating. In addition, they required all the data to be in their format; we couldn't deviate from that.

Many of our Trace account managers and processors were leaving, but we weren't notified until the people had actually left. So we would be emailing someone and would get an out of office, saying they had left the company!"

Iain added, “Communication was through a private interface on their portal. This was the only way you could raise a question. However, where that went to and how quickly it was answered was quite random and sporadic. Sometimes they would get back to us in an instant, and other times it could be days and we wouldn't have heard anything and would have to chase them.”

One of the idiosyncrasies of the Neilson payroll was the need to carry across two identifier numbers, one for the employee and one for the role. This was fundamental to integration with their HR and financial systems.

Ian explained, “Despite reassurances, when we migrated there wasn’t any facility to capture that data on the new platform. That caused many issues when we were getting reports back from them because they were missing all that critical data we needed. As a result, the whole process became very manual.

We have our own HR system because of the complexity of what we do. It isn’t just day to day HR management. We’ve had to make a bespoke system that covers all our legalities and various visa paperwork and the payroll paperwork that goes with that visa documentation. You can't buy an off the shelf system that can tick all the boxes we needed, so we had to go bespoke. On the back of that, it meant that our hands were always tied when having to integrate into any other platforms.”

 

THE MOVE TO DATAPLAN

Unhappy with the service Neilson Active Holidays looked to move to a payroll provider who was able to deliver the service they needed and could fit around their current processes and systems.

Katie outlined what they were looking for.

“Over the last two years, when we had so many staff on furlough and the business was ‘hibernating’, Iain and I spent a lot of time redesigning the payroll process to make it more automated and less capable of human error.

We aimed to press a button on our HR database, and it would download a list of static changes for payroll; then, we wanted to be able to import that to someone and for them to process the payroll. Then, we wanted a report back from the payroll provider that tells us the payroll data we can then upload back into our HR system to produce the payslips.

We had spent loads of money developing these reports to come out of our system, so; if we were going to move, it needed to be to someone where we wouldn’t need to change it all again. We just wanted to use what we already had, and that is where Dataplan was perfect. We can use the data we have, and then you do what you do, fiddle about with it, and it comes out the other end. Edna does her thing!”

Iain explained further why they chose Dataplan.

Knowing that Dataplan was an SME business with 150 employees rather than a big conglomerate was a key decider for us. With a smaller company, you know who to go to within the business, and you find they are supportive and helpful. Similar to our business, the customer service from a business that size is better because you count as a customer and aren’t just part of a big mass.

"And also, we are the customer, so why should we have to be the ones to change our systems just so ‘you’ can take our custom? In this day and age, a system should be able to send in a load of data and templates, and it sorts it and spits it back out, as Dataplan does.

You need to trust that the system will do the right thing, and we just didn't have that trust with our previous provider. It meant that Katie had to spend days checking, re-checking and triple-checking that everything was right. Katie has other duties and tasks that she can now pick up to support the business. That is a better return on investment in her role, rather than spending her time manually administering payroll."

Commenting on the experience with Dataplan to date, Katie commented, "We have completed our first full month. We did the parallel run in November, and then we did our full month in December, and we had zero errors and no queries from staff; it was all very smooth.”